A bearded face stares back from the image above. From the photograph below, it’s hard to distinguish the face at all—although the photograph depicts the same object, a Hellenistic oil lamp excavated during the 2014 season at Bethsaida, Israel, by director Rami Arav and his team.1 The lamp came from Area A West, which was supervised by Dr. Carl Savage of Drew University. The first image was taken using Reflectance Transformation Imaging (RTI), a new technology developed to show the texture of a surface. RTI images are created by taking numerous photos of an object from the same angle—but […]
